It may be fascist, it may not be, but what he's arguing in that piece isn't strictly wrong. Representative democracy has largely failed, and, like Thiel said, is incompatible with maximum freedom. However, whether maximum freedom is desirable (I don't think it is) is up to the reader.
Failure is the right word for indirect democracy, which is also known as representative democracy.
Every terrible President in the past fifty years hasn't been elected by popular vote, representative democracies enable gerrymandering, and direct democracy has been shown repeatedly to have none of these problems. See: Switzerland.
